….And never spend another hour sorting through hundreds of socks, trying to find the match.
I discovered the best laundry tip on Pinterest recently that completely changed my life. How I wish that I would have started doing this years ago!
The idea is simple:
Buy each person in your family a simple mesh lingerie bag (you can get them for just over a dollar at Target).
We decided to make each of our bags unique. Using Sharpie fabric markers (called Stained), each of us decorated their own bag. If you do this, just make sure there’s plenty of newspaper underneath.
The kids loved decorating their bags!
Once the bags are ready, attach a pants hanger to the top (you know all of those hangers you get when you buy kids clothes? We had a ton of them!). Let each person find a place where the bag will be easily accessible. Mine is hanging right behind my bedroom door. AJ’s is hanging on his bunk bed.
Once a week or so, gather all of the mesh bags and zip them up. Throw them in the washer and then in the dryer with a normal load of laundry. When they are dry, each person gets their sock bag back and folds and puts away their week’s worth of clean socks.
No more sorting though to figure out whose are whose. No mismatched pairs. It has been working brilliantly.
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Tanya, I know this post is old but what I used to do was each child had their own little laundry basket to
use. After washing I placed their things in the basket and onto their beds to put away. Maybe you can empty the socks out of the laundry bag and put into the basket instead. It is harder to lose a basket than a mesh bag. :) I also use to use a different beach towel for each of my children and they always could see which towel was theirs to hang or put away. Use of individual hooks in their bathroom really helped. Placed them low enough to reach and didn’t have to have 9 towels on one towel bar. :)
Hope this gives you some ideas
Great tip! I’m also a fan of buying multiple pairs of the same sock to help conserve little socks. More on that here:
https://hintmama.com/2013/11/06/todays-hint-how-to-conserve-little-and-big-socks/
Yes, cooperation from the kids is key. It’s not fool-proof, but it definitely helps. :)
Now if there was only a way to get the laundry bags back from the kids, it might actually work. I give them the bags with their socks and underwear, but I rarely get the bags back. Then they get lost and there goes that idea.
Good idea! There is always one pesky sock that goes missing…
I’ve used those little mesh bags for socks ever since my girls were born – almost 4 years ago – and we’ve only lost one sock I think! Sometimes you can find bigger ones, too, and I love those for sweaters or finer things that can still go in the wash. Will have to try this when they’re a bit older, though. Thx for sharing.
What a great idea. I have also tried putting safety pins on them after the kids take their socks off so that they go in the washer and dryer together and dont get seperated
Yes, the socks to just fine inside the bags while drying. I just wouldn’t fill the bag too full. You want to make sure there’s room for them to move. :)
That’s a brilliant idea. Our kids’ socks are always getting mixed together. I assume that they dry ok in the dryer when in the bags? That would be my only concern.
Great idea!
You rock my socks (pun intended)!! This is an AWESOME idea! Thank you!
COLOR the bags!!! that’s brilliant!
That’s a great idea, too! I don’t know if my kids would follow through with the pins, especially since our washing machine is two floors away from our bedrooms and bathroom. :)
Oh, I totally have the basket full of unsorted socks AND socks without mates. I haven’t gotten through all of them since getting the laundry bags. Hopefully we’ll be able to eliminate the sock madness for good here pretty soon.
I grew up in a house with 5 children and of coarse 2 adults and at times grandparents lived there too. We all wore socks. What we did was pin the socks together to go through the wash. It was really simple. Our washer was in the bathroom (another good idea) so when we took our clothes off mother taught us to pin the socks together and put them into the hamper with our underware..the other clothes went into the other hamper. Then when the wash was dry we took the pins out and put the pins back into the jar for the next time. We did laundry every day. We had 1 washer and no dryer at the time. We hung laundry to dry on a line outside.
I may have to give this a try — a few months ago, I decided that matching mis matched socks was as good a torture as sleep deprivation! I’m embarrassed to say that I have a GIANT basket of socks with no mates. I’m not sure how long to wait for the ‘missing’ sock to turn up.
That’s life with a big family ;)